Abstract: This paper solves the planar navigation problem by recourse to an online
reactive scheme that exploits recent advances in SLAM and visual object
recognition to recast prior geometric knowledge in terms of an offline
catalogue of familiar objects. The resulting vector field planner guarantees
convergence to an arbitrarily specified goal, avoiding collisions along the way
with fixed but arbitrarily placed instances from the catalogue as well as
completely unknown fixed obstacles so long as they are strongly convex and well
separated. We illustrate the generic robustness properties of such
deterministic reactive planners as well as the relatively modest computational
cost of this algorithm by supplementing an extensive numerical study with
physical implementation on both a wheeled and legged platform in different
settings.